We Know San Francisco Is Freakishly Expensive But These Images Make It All Super Clear

It's true and it hurts.

While it might be a perfect place to live for the amazing weather, ocean shores and wine culture, it's simply too unaffordable for many people. It was even named as the priciest 2014 travel destination, according to TripAdvisor's annual TripIndex Cities report.

But instead of boring you with numbers, percents and data-rich graphs, two local San Franciscans decided to take a spin at telling you how costly their city really is. Designer Annalisa van der Bergh and photographer Sierra Hartman of The Bold Italic created a series of simplistic images that use food to compare prices between Frisco and other American cities.

Hartman and van der Bergh claim to have used data from Lovely to imagine how much more bang for the same amount of buck you would get in various parts of the country.

For instance, the above example of San Francisco vs. Albuquerque shows how the same amount of $1,900 buys you drastically different things: one bedroom apartment in Frisco compared to a lofty four bedroom house with a view to the Sandia mountains.

The astronomical housing expenses in San Francisco can be explained through supply and demand, says Business Insider. Recent boom of well-paid tech employees at Silicon Valley has inflated the rents. On the other hand, maybe San Francisco doesn't have enough room to fit all the people?

Due to its geographical position, the only way for San Francisco to grow is... up.

Which is, again, impossible because of the strict city zoning regulations. This map shows how almost all of the city has a limited height of 4 storey buildings. And they don't even go that high. Most of them are one- to three- stories tall.

These skyrocketing rents are displacing hundreds of middle- and low- income families. San Francisco is also suffering from the fastest growing income inequality in the nation, according to SFGate.